Big Dan's Corner

This morning I pulled the stats for vBulletin admin and found this little amazing factoid: 70% of the search results which landed people here were based on finding vBulletin customer numbers. Now maybe a few were actually trying to find out how to recover their customer information but a safe bet is people are looking for customer numbers and passwords that someone accidentally posted somewhere on the internet in order to download vBulletin illegally.

You and I know there are many other forum packages out there such as phpBB, SMF, MyBB, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We also know that out of those most popular packages, one has gaping security holes, another is just plain ugly, and another has a small but growing user base so not much help or many modifications (hacks) are available yet.

Why do people want to download vBulletin illegally? Arguably vBulletin has the best set of features, support team, continuously supported hacks, and 3rd party developers around. Pirates want all the support and stability of vBulletin that paying customers receive but don’t want to shell out a measly $160 for a lifetime license or even $85 to try it for 1 year and see if their community grows.

Anyone who has been around any of the vBulletin forums for more than a week has seen the excuses, “it’s my mates board” , “I lost my password”, etcetera so can you please go download this hack for me from vbulletin.org?

Let me inject some common sense here: If the forum is owned by their mate (friend) then their friend can download hacks. If they’ve lost there password there is no good reason why they shouldn’t be able to verify the information with Jelsoft and recover the information.

Luckily the 3rd party support forums I visit don’t support pirates and make every available effort to verify owners. The same cannot be said for everyone though be careful where you get your hacks and vBulletin help.

Most of all don’t support the pirates because sooner or later all those pirates running free vBulletin boards are going to drive up prices for the good people who pay for the software!